The Birth of the Human | The Modern Fantasy of Prehistory (1750-2010) - NYU CAS
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The Birth of the Human | The Modern Fantasy of Prehistory (1750-2010)
Professor Stefanos Geroulanos
Core Curriculum Course, Spring 2020. CORE-UA 400:040
MW 3:30-4:45 – 207 Silver Center
When was “the human” born? Where do human beings come from? What was early humanity like?
How has it changed or progressed since those times? What characteristics of human beings are
particularly human, constitutive of our essence or our being? How long ago were those early times?
What was language like at first? Did culture proper emerge in Greece? In India? In Africa? At a
historical fount of races and nations? In “primitive” culture? Which origin should be taken most
seriously—that of the human species, or that of modern culture? Were the “early times” a kind of
utopia that needs to be recaptured? Is the fact of our biological singularity and evolution to be
identified with our cultural difference or proximity? And, given change and progress, where is mankind
today, and where is it going? What would be the effect of seeking to reconceive and reconstitute a
society based on the supposed purity of the origin?
This overview course in modern intellectual history does not seek to answer these questions—it seeks
to explain how they came about, how they came to be asked in the ways we ask them, and how they
came to matter. It takes on a complex and highly popular fantasy, namely the idea that humanity and
modernity can be traced to a prehistoric moment when “the human” was born out of the animal. The
course thus obsesses over the modern compulsion to re-divine and often re-live the supposed moment
when humanity can be glimpsed at its most basic, most archaic, most “primitive” or “native” moment.
Today we most often identify it with a movement of Homo sapiens “out of Africa,” but such a claim
co-exists with theories of the origin of language, of the origin of Indo-European languages and myths,
nationalist theories of a communal purity, theories of representation in cave art, technological theories
concerning manmade tools and human posture, and so on. These are mixed systems, most often co-
existing but sometimes conflicting. We will be concerned with both philosophical texts and scientific
efforts to identify and clarify this origin, with the political implications of such origins, and not least
with efforts to determine who (which discipline? which political party?) should have authority for
determining and using “the origin.” Why does “prehistory” matter to us, and how has it mattered over
the course of the last two centuries? What stories and accounts have replaced and complemented
biblical narratives? We will read some of the crucial texts in the period from the 1750s to the 1960s,
with some more contemporary references, tracking the answers offered by philosophers,
anthropologists, biologists, linguists, poets, and politicians.
The obsession with reconstituting prehistory is closely tied to modern colonialism and racism, but also
to universalism and at times even anti-colonialism. It concerns modern figures of sovereignty and
power, but it also speaks to the ways in which European and American intellectuals and scientists
produce and negotiate knowledge about humanity itself. Above all, because intellectuals have used
their analytical tools and priorities to project this highly speculative moment of a “cradle of humanity”
backwards in time, it has often been synonymous, even identical, with the way thinkers have defined
humanity, and suffers from ideological and usually fantastical components.
Our purpose is to trace the principal currents and moments in the understanding of human prehistory,
from the early 1800s to the present. It is also to learn to read closely and critique the ideological
premises and consequences of political and humanistic ideas, ideas about ourselves, where we come
from, what we aim for—not only in the racial theories of the 19th- and early 20th-century but just as
much in the often far more enticing 20th- and 21st-century versions.Lectures
1. What is “Prehistory?” Modern Fantasy and Secular Science [M 1/27]
2. Dating the “State of Nature”: “Colonized Savages” and the Entry into Prehistory [W 1/29]
Reading: Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on the Origin of Inequality (1755), 1-70.
3. The Stages of Humanity & the Construction of Prehistory around 1800 [M 2/3]
Reading: Marquis de Condorcet, Outline of a Historical View of the Progress of Mankind (1795), 3-20.
Johann G. Herder, Another Philosophy of History (1774), 3-16, 18-26.
Auguste Comte, Positive Philosophy, vol.1, pp.1-5; vol.3, pp.1-15
4. Anthropogenesis and Myths of Origin [W 2/5]
Reading: Tacitus, Germania, sections 1-8, 11-15, 19.
Edward Gibbon, Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire (1776), 273-303.
Johann G. Herder, Yet Another Philosophy of History (1774), 32-35, 109-117.
5. Historical Design and Geological & Linguistic Discoveries around 1800 [M 2/10]
Reading: William Jones, On the Hindus: The Third Anniversary Discourse (1785)
Franz Bopp, Comparative Grammar (1833), preface, v-xvi.
Charles Lyell, Geological Evidences for the Antiquity of Man, 369-384.
Hegel, Introduction to the Philosophy of History (1829), 12-26.
6. Geological and Evolutionary Perspectives: Populating the Worlds before Adam [W 2/12]
Reading: Charles Darwin, The Origin of Species (1859): 1-14, 60-130.
[First Take-Home Paper Topics To Be Shared]
[No class on Monday 2/17]
7. Native Peoples and Darwin’s Border between Ape and Man [W 2/19]
Reading: Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man (1871): 17-87, 152-171, 621-651. [intro., chs 1,2,3,5,19]
8. The Language of Paradise: The Uses of the Ancients, I [M 2/24]
Reading: Genesis 6-9, 11-12.
J. J. Winckelmann, History of the Art of Antiquity (1764), 71-78, 111-123.
Comte de Volney, The Ruins: A Meditation on the Revolutions of Empires
9. The Uses of the Ancients, II: Classicism and Modernity [W 2/26]
Reading: Alfred Zimmern, The Greek Commonwealth (1911), 180-199, and skim the preface.
Richard Wagner, The Artwork of the Future (1849), 69-90, 95-99.
Heinrich Schliemann, Mycenae (1878), 333-350.
[First Take-Home Paper is Due.]
10. Evolutionary Humanity I: The Primitive as Category [M 3/2]
Reading: E. B. Tylor, Primitive Culture (1871), 1-28, 418-429.
L. H. Morgan, Ancient Society (1877): Table of Contents, v-viii, 343-357, 523-527.
John Lubbock, Prehistoric Times (1869), Table of Contents.
11. Matrilineal Society, Matriarchy, and Marxism [W 3/4]
Reading: Friedrich Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property, and the State (1884), 35-38, 51-115, 195-217.
12. Secularization and Prehistory: The Totem and the King [M 3/9]
Reading: James Frazer, “The Crucifixion of Christ,” The Golden Bough, VI: The Scapegoat, 1913 edition, 412-23.
William Robertson-Smith, Religion of the Semites (1889), lecture 8.13. Prehistory and the Archaeological Imagination [W 3/11]
Reading: H. G. Wells, The Outline of History: Being a Plain History of Life and Mankind, 53-114.
Arthur Evans, The Palace of Minos (1921), read the first chapter (& skim preface and table of contents)
Spring Break [3/16-3/22]
14. Indo-European “Sovereignty”: The Invention of the Aryan [M 3/23]
Reading: Max Müller: “India: What Can It Teach Us?” (1883), pages 8-23 of the PDF.
V. Gordon Childe, The Aryans (1927), 3-13.
15. Freud, Part One [W 3/25]
Reading: Sigmund Freud (1913), Totem and Taboo, chapter 1
Carl G. Jung, “Archetypes of the Collective Unconscious” (1954).
16. The Psyche, from Animism to Psychoanalysis (Freud, Part Two) [M 3/30]
Reading: Sigmund Freud, Totem and Taboo, chapter 4.
17. Nazism, Race, and the Ancients [W 4/1]
Reading: Alfred Rosenberg, The Myth of the Twentieth Century (1930), short selection.
Albert Speer, Inside the Third Reich, 50-71.
Alfred Bäumler, “Hellas and Germania” (1935)
18. The Birth of UNESCO: The Singularity and Diversity of Humanity [M 4/6]
Reading: UNESCO Declaration on Race (1950)
Claude Lévi-Strauss, “Race and History” (1953-54), 95-135.
Optional: Louis Menand, “How Cultural Anthropologists Redefined Humanity,” The New Yorker link
19. Catholicism meets the Future: Teilhard from China to Africa [W 4/8]
Reading: Pierre Teilhard de Chardin, The Phenomenon of Man (1955), 31-39; 174-191; 200-213; 245-272
Leopold Sédar Senghor, short selection on Teilhard
20. Cave Paintings from Altamira through Lascaux to Chauvet [M 4/13]
Reading: Georges Bataille, “A Visit to Lascaux” and “The Passage from Animal to Man and the Birth
of Art,” in The Cradle of Humanity, 47-81.
Film: Cave of Forgotten Dreams (Werner Herzog, 2010); clips to be shown during lecture and section.
[Second Take-Home Paper Topics To Be Shared]
21. The ‘Extinction of the Native’ and the ‘End’ of Anthropology [W 4/15]
Reading: Claude Lévi-Strauss, Tristes Tropiques (1955), chapters 1, 4, 9, 24-28, 38.
22. “Out of Africa” [M 4/20]
Reading: Cheikh Anta Diop, The African Origin of Civilization (1955), xii-xvii, 134-155.
Robert Ardrey, African Genesis (1961), 9-32.
Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man (1973), 15-37.
Film: 2001: A Space Odyssey (Stanley Kubrick, 1968)
intro and concluding section (please watch the whole film on your own).
23. Evolutionary Humanity II, The Neanderthal as “our” Double [W 4/22]
Reading: William Golding, The Inheritors, short selection
[Second Take-Home Paper is Due.]
[Final Paper Topics Shared]24. Tools and Technology: Homo faber’s Prehistoric Diversity in a Cybernetic World [M 4/27]
Reading: Kenneth Oakley, Man the Toolmaker (1949), 1-3.
Sherwood L. Washburn, “Tools and Human Evolution,” Scientific American, 203:3 (1960), 62-75
André Leroi-Gourhan, Gesture and Speech (1965), 3-4; 18-21; 51-55, 117-44; 183-85, 401-408
Optional: Ben James “A Sneaky Theory of Where Language Came From,” The Atlantic (June 10, 2018) link
25. “Primitive Warfare:” the State, Nonstate Peoples, and War [W 4/29]
Reading: Pierre Clastres, “Society against the State,” in Society against the State (1975), 189-217.
Film clips: Dead Birds (Robert Gardner, 1963).
Optional: Erika L. Milam, “The Hunt for Human Nature” Aeon (Nov.2018), link
26. Feminism and Prehistory [M 5/4]
Reading: Juliet Mitchell, Psychoanalysis and Feminism (1974), 364-381.
Susan Brownmiller, Against our Will: Men, Women, and Rape (1975), 11-30
Elaine Morgan, The Descent of Woman (1972), selection.
27. Prehistory Today [W 5/6]
Reading: Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind (2014), 3-25.
James C. Scott, Against the Grain (2018), 1-36.
28. Conclusion: Is a Birth of Humanity Necessary? [M 5/11]
Overview of the Course and Exam Prep
[Final Paper Due]
Final Exam [F 5/15 2pm-3:50pm]
Instructors
Professor Stefanos Geroulanos sg127@nyu.edu
Office Hours: MW 12:30-1:30 53 Washington Square South, #418
Emily Long esl392@nyu.edu
Office Hours: Th 11:00-12:15 & by appointment 53 Washington Square South, #527
Alexander Langstaff al5348@nyu.edu
Office Hours: Th 2:30-3:30 & by appointment 53 Washington Square South, #527
Anne Schult as7415@nyu.edu
Office Hours: M 5-6pm & Wed 2:15-3:15pm 53 Washington Square South, #324Organization
The course is structured around two lectures and one recitation per week.
Texts and Ideas courses in the Core Curriculum are intended to foster your appreciation of humanistic learning, and
provide a foundation of your liberal arts education through encounters with literary and philosophical works that have
been influential in shaping the contemporary world and significant instances in which the ideas in these works have been
debated, developed, appropriated, or rejected.
Lecture: Lectures consist of a mixture of general discussion of the subject of a particular lecture as noted in the outline
and close readings of certain of the texts we are reading that week. Lectures intertwine with one another, through recurrent
themes, and as a result some books or texts are approached more than once. You are expected to have read the texts
before each lecture, and I may call on you. The use of computers and phones is not permitted. Reading amounts to about
50 pages per lecture.
Participation: Presence and participation is an absolute necessity: one absence is fine, but further absences will adversely
affect student grades. Every absence from a recitation without a doctor’s note will count against the participation grade,
and three absences from a recitation will simply zero the in-class participation grade. Please make a point of bringing the
readings with you to the sections: not doing so hampers you as to what points you can make, how you can engage
discussion, what questions you can ask about the text itself. Again, you may not use computers, tablets, or phones in
class. As importantly, your presence is not enough: this is about arguing and learning how to argue, how to read texts
closely and capaciously, and vigorous participation and argument is expected of you. Your opinion and your position
matter, and articulating them in the most effective manner comes with effort, contribution, and debate!
Recitation prep: Students are expected to write short papers (a long paragraph) answering a question set by the
instructors, and to bring them to the lecture on the Wednesday afternoon before a recitation. Each of these response
papers discuss the texts of the week and may include 2-3 questions afterward to help prompt discussion.
Take-home Midterm Essays, Final Essay, Final Exam: Students are also expected to write two 3-page take-home midterm
papers, due on February 26 and April 22 respectively. A 6-page final paper will be due at the last class, May 11. Per the
rules of the Core Program, there will be a final exam, on May 15, at 2-4pm. Questions for all three papers will be handed
out ten days in advance by the instructors. Delayed submissions will be penalized to the rate of 1/3 of a grade per day.
Plagiarism in any assignment will result in a failing grade not only for the assignment but for the class. Repeat: do not
plagiarize or you will fail the course.
Grade Breakdown. The grade breakdown is organized around the Core Program’s requirements for papers and exams.
First Paper 10% Second Paper 15%
Final Paper 20% Final Exam 15%
Participation: 40% (13% response papers; 27% in-class participation)
The Core Program has a pretty detailed description of grades, and it goes as follows (we have no choice but to follow it).
A Clearly Superior Work. Maximum 10% of the class.
A- Clearly superior but with an obvious shortcoming. No more than 10-15% of the class.
B+ Very good work. 10-15% of the class.
B Good
B- Good but with some obvious deficits in logic or execution.
C+ More than satisfactory but not adequate to grade as “good.”
C Satisfactory
C- Less than satisfactory.
D+ Poor but with some characteristics of effort, logic, execution.
D Poor.
F Fails to rise to the level of creditable achievement.
Students may contest the grade awarded to a midterm, final paper, or final exam assignment, by lodging a detailed appeal
with the professor that explains why the grade awarded does not represent the argument, logic, detail, and execution
involved in the student’s paper or exam. There is no guarantee that the professor is a more lenient grader than your AI!You can also read
